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This article examines the notion of skepticism about the external world. It attempts to provide an understanding of what the skeptic means by the external world when he denies knowledge of the external world. It considers several popular but misguided replies to skepticism about the external world and reconstructs several lines of skeptical argument. It discusses the so-called semantic contextualism as a more promising approach to external-world skepticism and argues that even if contextualism is correct about the semantics of “knows” and related language, it fails to give us the sort of...

This article examines the notion of skepticism about the external world. It attempts to provide an understanding of what the skeptic means by the external world when he denies knowledge of the external world. It considers several popular but misguided replies to skepticism about the external world and reconstructs several lines of skeptical argument. It discusses the so-called semantic contextualism as a more promising approach to external-world skepticism and argues that even if contextualism is correct about the semantics of “knows” and related language, it fails to give us the sort of explanation we want in a satisfying response to skepticism.